RD: Psirens
Overview Discovering that they have lost Red Dwarf, the Starbug crew have to negotiate a dangerous asteroid belt filled with carnivorous GELFs. Summary Lister awakens with amnesia and Kryten explains that he's been in Deep Sleep aboard Starbug for the past 200 years. When Rimmer and Cat both recover from their hibernation, Kryten updates them on the situation: Red Dwarf itself had been stolen by an unknown party and the original crew had been chasing the ship's vapour trail ever since. The Red Dwarf has currently been forced to circumnavigate an asteroid belt, giving the Starbug the opportunity to reach the ship by shortcutting through the belt. However, the belt turns out to be a spaceship graveyard inhabited by Psirens, telepathic GELFs who lure unwary travellers to them and suck out their brains. Cat is almost lured by two attractive women and Lister sees Kochanski, who tells him that she has two children, Jim and Bexley, that are his. A flaming meteor then appears hurling towards the ship, but Kryten deduces it to be an illusion as Starbug's sensors do not detect it. Unfortunately, Rimmer is left in charge and assumes another flaming meteor to be fake; the illusion this time, is the lack of response from the ship's sensors. Starbug is struck and crashes onto an asteroid. Lister exits the ship to blast the front landing gear out. Outside he encounters a lustful figure from his adolescence (the sister of one Pete Tranter). Lister snogs with the woman not knowing it is actually a hideous Psiren. He is ironically saved by another Psiren disguised as Kryten, whom murders the first one in order to steal its victim and is in turn killed by a panicking Lister. Lister manages to get back on board Starbug safely, only for a second Lister to arrive claiming he is the real article. To determine which is the false Lister, the crew ask them to play guitar, which Lister does poorly but the Psiren does extremely well. They have found their imposter and blast it away. However, as Lister gets suitably upset by their accusations that he is a poor guitar player, the Psiren escapes to the decks below. A trail of yellow Psiren blood leads to the engine room. Lister and Cat stay behind to deal with a meteor shower, while Rimmer declines the offer to help, leaving Kryten to follow the psiren blood trail alone. When Kryten finds the Psiren it changes into Professor Mamet, his creator. With no choice but to obey her commands, he climbs into the waste compactor and starts it up. Lister, Cat and Rimmer quickly appear to find Kryten's psi-scan and bazookoid, abandoned on the floor. Rimmer suddenly fades out as his hologramatic light bee battery runs flat. Now just the two of them, Lister and Cat walk up to the Psiren disguised as a vending machine. As the Psiren decides which to eat first, Kryten, now cube shaped from his experience in the waste compactor, waddles over to the edge of the walkway from the deck above and crashes down on top of it. The threat ended, the crew continue onward, following the Red Dwarf into a vast nebula. Notes * Among the wrecked spaceships in the asteroid field are models of the Narcissus shuttle from Alien, the Eagle from Space: 1999 and a Klingon Vor'cha class attack cruiser from Star Trek: The Next Generation. * Clare Grogan appears as Kochanski for the final time; this is also the last appearance of the original version of the character introduced in Series I. When Kochanski next appears in Series VII, she will be played by another actress and be, effectively, a completely new character. * This is the first episode to have an open-ended conclusion, leading into the next episode. Noteworthy Dialogue *'Kryten:' The poor devil scrawled it in his death throes, using a combination of his own blood and even some lengths of his own intestines. Rimmer: Who would do that? Lister: Someone who badly needed a pen. Cat: What I don't understand is why he went to the trouble of using his kidney as a full stop. Rimmer: I don't think he meant to do that. It probably just plopped out. Background Information Any behind the scenes information or any other information that doesn't fit in the other categories. Guest Stars * Jenny Agutter as Professor Mamet. * Samantha Robson as Pete Tranter's Sister * Anita Dobson as Captain Tau * Clare Grogan as Kristine Kochanski * Zoe Hilson and Elizabeth Anson as female colonists. Discontinuity, Plot Holes, Errors *If everyone bar Kryten has been in stasis for 200 years, what rubbish would he have to throw out at the start of the episode? Possibly burned out ship parts, waste organic matter, things of that sort to finish off cleaning the ship prior to awakening the crew. *Why does Starbug have two stasis pods when previously stated that Red Dwarf in a whole has only two? They are Deep Sleep units, which only slow time down rather than stop it completely (80%-95%), in Out of Time, Kryten established a temporary "Stasis seal" on the Deep Sleep units. *A few details are omitted from the episode. We never see Cat coming out of stasis, it's never explained how Starbug managed to fall more than 200 years behind Red Dwarf, and it's not explained how Starbug was able to sustain itself - even with the living crew in stasis - for 200 years when Demons & Angels established it could only stay away from Red Dwarf for a few hours. *In this episode Kryten says his brain is entirely synthetic but in DNA it is said to be part organic *At the end of series seven, it found out that red dwarf has been turned into a planetoid and a microscopic dwarf, which is what they were chasing. However, in this episode, red dwarf avoids the asteroid field due to being to large, but if it isn't, why did it avoid the asteroids? It didn't. Holly in Series VIII revealed that he had created the vapour trail and the new set of nanobots later on in Series VII to keep Listers mind occupied and keep Lister sane. As the ships computer, this was his job and pretty much everything that happened in Series VI and VII was Holly's doing. Therefore, Red Dwarf had always been that planetoid, and the vapour trail was not actually the ship but an adventure created by Holly. The microscopic Red Dwarf is not in space, but in Listers laundry basket. It's a small space but with the ship being microscopic, it was a more than sufficiently large area of space for the nanobots to explore. References Other articles of things featured in this particular episode {C Category:Series VI Episodes Category:Episodes